Editor’s Note: Welcome to the latest installment of our Build My Business series, in which our in-house experts and insatiably curious marketers show you how they would use LeadPages® to launch a campaign for a very specific—though hypothetical—business purpose. This week, marketing project manager Jason Martin digs into two of his favorite subjects: cuisine and marketing.

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During high school and college, I experienced the hustle and bustle of working in restaurant kitchens as an entry-level cook (though of course I thought of myself as a chef). So today, when I go out to local restaurants, I make a habit of looking around me and wondering what’s going on behind the scenes.

Which tables are part of a loyal customer base? Who’s visiting for the first time—and will they come back? What got these people in the door?

I usually assume it was through word of mouth, whether referrals or reviews. When I worked in restaurants, I noticed there was never much money to spend beyond basic operating costs. These places had neither the cashflow to sustain a marketing budget nor the expertise to execute a digital strategy.

But even with a shoestring budget, I think the average small restaurant—even a brand new one without much existing word of mouth—can gain a lot from some basic, inexpensive marketing assets, as long as they’re linked together in the right way. That’s what I set out to do with this start-to-finish marketing campaign.

To get a detailed look at my strategy and see at a glance how the different pieces connect, download my free campaign map below:

If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your own server.

If you run any kind of brick-and-mortar business with a tiny marketing budget, I hope you’ll find some helpful tips here.

The Goal: Leverage Seasonal Celebration to Get New Customers Who’ll Spread the Word

There’s nothing like a holiday when you’re in the restaurant business. With Valentine’s Day approaching, I thought this would be the an ideal time to kick a digital marketing funnel into gear for a small restaurant.

Many, many small businesses run Valentine’s Day and other holiday promotions, of course. But in my experience, few of them design those promotions to keep getting results year round. That’s a major, underrecognized opportunity that I seize in this campaign.

Because I wanted to design a strategy that would truly work for nearly any restaurant, I decided to make things a little bit tricky for myself. The imaginary restaurant I devised for this campaign would be a brand new American neighborhood restaurant in Brooklyn—plenty of competition, not much of an existing reputation.

In other words, it might have a harder time than most established restaurants filling its tables on Valentine’s Day, when couples tend to flock to old favorites or splurge on new destination restaurants.

This campaign is designed to change that, and permanently boost my new venture’s status on the culinary scene. Here’s a visual overview of how it will work:

Click to enlarge.

Step 1: Make the Most of Free Traffic Sources

As a restaurant, I have an advantage that many other kinds of businesses don’t: I’m almost guaranteed to have some kind of presence on the web due to outlets such as:

Yelp

Google reviews

Restaurant listings in local publications

Local food and neighborhood news blogs

Location services like Google Places and Foursquare

That’s a ton of free publicity, and I’ll use it to my advantage by being sure to “claim” any listings I can. I’ll also set up a Google Alert for my restaurant name to make sure I can follow up with any media coverage and make sure all the details are right—including my website URL. (More on that later.)

Other traffic sources require a little more effort, but they’re still well within my capabilities. I’d also get initial attention by:

Most of these sources will link to my main website’s home page by default; in other cases, such as my own social posts, I can direct traffic to any page of my choice. I’ll use both in the next stage of my campaign.

Step 2: Get the Reservation

You can get endlessly elaborate with restaurant website design. But I’m trying to keep my marketing budget low, so I’ll choose a landing page template that looks great out of the box and is easy to customize.

Unlike most restaurant home pages, this one has a prominent call to action: Book a Valentine’s Day Reservation. That means that during this promotion, traffic arriving from earned media and listing sites will all be directed right where I want it to go. When they click, visitors go to a second landing page:

This page is visually consistent with my home page, but it’s all about my call to action: make a Valentine’s Day reservation and automatically be entered in a drawing to get your dinner free.

When visitors opt in to reserve, I’ll use a LeadBox™ (triggered by the call to action button) to collect their email address so I can enter them in the contest. Then, I’ll set my OpenTable page as thank you page for the LeadBox™ so customers can book immediately afterward.

Meanwhile, I’ll use my own social media channels to tell people about the contest and link straight to this landing page.

Step 3: Get Them to the Restaurant

Now, I want to make sure all the people who made reservations actually show up. So I’ll give them an extra incentive while opening up a new avenue for customer contact.

I’ll integrate my LeadBox with Emma, an email marketing service designed for creative small businesses. Using Emma, I’ll build an autoresponder email that will go out a few days after someone opts into my LeadBox™.

This email will do two things:

1. Remind them about their reservation

2. Give them an extra incentive to show up and stay in contact

In my email message, I’ll encourage customers to text my LeadDigit to opt in for a free champagne toast with their meal; I can either use the Lead Magnet Delivery system to automatically send them a coupon, or they can simply show the confirmation message on their phones to redeem. Giant chains such as Chipotle have used this tactic effectively in recent months:

Meanwhile, I’ll have collected the information and permission I’ll need to contact them by text if I decide to run a full-blown mobile marketing campaign in the future.

At this point, the first phase of my campaign is done. I can shift my focus away from marketing and back to all the things I need to do to make sure my new customers have the best Valentine’s Day meal possible.

That will include making sure I set the scene for a very photogenic evening to encourage couples to share their experience on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. When you combine the natural impulse to take couple-selfies on Valentine’s Day with the year-round impulse to document beautifully composed meals, it’s a ripe occasion for social sharing. I could even print our social handles on the special menu so that these posts link back to us.

Step 4: Get Them to Come Back—and Spread the Word

A day or so after Valentine’s Day weekend, I’ll use an automated email to reach out to my new customers and invite them to tell us how their meal was. I’ll include a link to this page, made with the Test Your Knowledge Opt-in Page template:

If they click the button on the left, they’ll see a message asking them to share their experience on Twitter—which I’ll make easy by making the call-to-action button a Twitter share button.

If they indicate that they weren’t happy, they’ll have a chance to request a phone call so I can make it right. (And if I can’t, I can remove them from my email list at this point to avoid reminding them of their unhappy experience and provoking negative user-generated reviews.)

With Valentine’s Day weekend behind me, I can start thinking about longer-term marketing. Now that I have a small email list, I can keep in touch with my new customers periodically to let them know about new menu items and events, encourage them to leave Yelp reviews, and reach out with new promotions during slow periods.

From one holiday and one promotion, I’ve generated revenue, positive word of mouth, and the start of a loyal customer base—all without spending any money beyond my fairly inexpensive subscriptions to LeadPages and Emma.

To see my detailed campaign diagram and try this sequence for your own small business, download the roadmap I created below:

If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your own server.

What kind of business or campaign would you like to see featured next in the Build My Business series? Tell us in the comments!

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This was beautiful! What most don’t recognize is that this can work for any service provider. Restaurants are a great focus point, but this could work for pool service groups, construction cos, and way more. Yeah, you would have to tweak, but the grandeur and outline is right here. Want to get a marketing job at a service co.? Take this and tweak it, change it and use it as your guideline to show the new boss! You will blow them away. Then when they hire you 1st thing you do is sign up for LEADPAGES.net and get it going.

Daphne Sidor

Ha, I like the way you think, Rob! Definitely, any service-based business can adapt this.

Rob Breedlove

Hi guys at leadpages.net! I would luv 2 c a business campaign for buddy SaaS businesses. Mine is lead gen so that would be really cool, but anything SaaS would be Awesome as I would love to use my leadpages now that I have signed up.